Category Archives: Creativity

Making sense

You can now listen to each new post, including this one, as a podcast. I am also gradually adding selected posts from the archive. Click here. If we look for milestones to prompt reflection and personal stocktaking, few come better … Continue reading

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Child leaders

A friend recently sent me the link to a Guardian article published in 2014 under the title: Why boarding schools produce bad leaders. I hadn’t seen the article, but I was familiar with its author. Nick Duffell was a contemporary … Continue reading

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Three cities

Place matters. It shapes thoughts and emotions. We have always encouraged people who come on our Dark Angels courses to connect as strongly as they can with the place where the course is held. We want that heightened awareness of … Continue reading

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Stranger at the Rodeo

Lost in the hills to the south of Perth is a former schoolhouse, one of the four or five buildings in a hamlet gloriously named Path of Condie. The place feels like an eyrie, with brackeny valleys plunging away below … Continue reading

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Come to the edge

Eighteen months ago I chaired an event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival with a novelist I know well, someone whose work I admire and whom I like very much as a person. Halfway through the event, in front of … Continue reading

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In praise of footering

We were sitting round the dinner table in our Airbnb lakeside cabin at Mont Tremblant, Quebec, last week – Sarah and I and our two grown-up children, Anna and Jake. Anna’s reaching the end of the first year of a … Continue reading

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Imagine better

Last week I went to the launch of this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival programme. It was the first official book festival event I’d been to since coming off the board last October, after 14 years. I felt oddly anxious … Continue reading

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Poetry path

In the hills a few miles outside our village of Birnam is a Camphill community. Here, on the Corbenic estate, 27 adults with learning difficulties live with their carers and a number of volunteers in 50 acres of agricultural land, … Continue reading

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Untold stories

If one is asked the same question often enough, no matter how difficult, one sooner or later comes up with an answer that can be given without too much further thought. It may not be precisely the right one, but … Continue reading

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Morning pages

Some years ago I read a book by the American writer Julia Cameron called The Right To Write. She is internationally famous for The Artist’s Way, which offers a 12-step guide to creative living, but I was drawn to the … Continue reading

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